Oculus VR’s New “Crystal Cove” Prototype Is Kind of Amazing
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Edit>> link to original thread http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1fxpqb/xpost_from_rc...
That being said, sign me up. I have a friend with an oculus dev kit and it has blown me away time and time again. I can see this kind of thing becoming reality. Just stick foam padding all over the place and you're golden.
Say for example, two people facing each other with a virtual wall between them. If both accidentally try to walk "though" the wall they would simply collide with each other, potentially causing injury or damage to equipment.
Not to be a buzzkill, I'd love a system that actually could support this, in theory a large room with many freedom of movement devices (like what Virtuix Omni is working on) would allow this idea in a much smaller space and no risk of players colliding.
1) Strafing is extremely unnatural. It involves standing still in the center, lifting one leg to the edge, and "swiping" it down towards the center. It's a very impractical move for any type of game where strafing is strategic.
2) Backwards motion is extremely difficult. Try to find a video of someone doing it effectively. It's rarely shown because it's not easy to do. This removes this movement as well from any game where backwards movement is strategic.
3) http://i.imgur.com/tsccO4H.jpg Not trying to be mean, but the visual of an adult using the Omni looks very much like a baby using a walker. I believe this limits the Omni to a product you'll only want to use by yourself, when nobody is around, because it looks silly.
4) The current version looks flimsy. Maybe they've beefed up the structure of the thing, but any video that I've watched has shown serious strain on the upright portions of the Omni itself.
5) The fact that you have to wear special shoes, and perform a procedure to get the Omni within reaching distance of a keyboard/mouse, and lock yourself in to the mechanism... seems like quite a bit of overhead to play a game essentially handicapped in terms of movement.
My prediction is that some people are going to be excited about Omni, buy it, try it a few times, and realize how limiting it is in actual gameplay, how limited they are in using their computer, the fact that they look silly to others, and the overhead involved in getting dressed and locked, and realize it isn't worth it. They'll push it to the side to collect dust, or try to sell it on craigslist.
(2) I don't disagree, but it's basically going to be awkward to handle any in-game motion that isn't realistic, whether it's backwards motion or unlimited running and six-foot jumps. I suspect that you'll need to specifically design your game for the Omni in order for it to work well.
I don't really understand sending rendered images over wifi but perhaps you could just build small computers or laptops to go in the backpacks?
You could also put an ultrasonic transducer on each player and do triangulation on that?
I answer that I'm terrified of running into something in the real world while my
vision is obscured, but they insist I'll be fine. It turns out the game space's
virtual walls correspond to the real ones in the admittedly small office I occupy
in meatspace.
I spoke with someone who used VR goggles many years ago. The tech demo he was show was simply being in a room with a bottomless pit in the middle. He said even though you knew that in reality there was a carpeted floor, it was impossible virtually impossible to make yourself walk over the pit. You just had way too many mental blocks that stopped you from doing it.
I imagine something similar would happen with a wall. It would feel very eery and uncomfortable to walk through the wall.
I think omnidirectional treadmills and more immersive audio will be good enough. I imagine eventually the floor of the treadmill will even be able to tilt when you're walking uphill.
This guy managed to get one of these systems working, and when last heard from was preparing for a Kickstarter: http://www.mtbs3d.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=138&t=15623
And XSens have a fully-working system, but it's Not Cheap.
http://www.tested.com/tech/459692-ces-2014-hands-oculus-vrs-...
Also worth watching that video to hear about the switch to an OLED screen and the latency advantage there. Employees at that company must have so much fun trying all the alternatives to build the best product.
(My dev kit in Australia is for sale if anyone is interested. Email in profile. It's amazing, but I'm curious more than I am a software developer so it might be more useful to someone else.)
IMO the downside of using a camera is that you automatically get some latency as part of the deal. A full frame has to be read out, digitized and the 3d position derived. Some other systems could have better real time characteristics. The cost of this system is presumably a factor.
I had hoped for a wireless unit by the time of the consumer release but I guess driving the screen might chew through battery? Not to mention that a battery would add complexity and size to the unit.
With regards to IR, I suppose it would work with a regular webcam.
The most in-depth discussions probably happen on the Oculus Developer Forums and the Oculus Subreddit. RoadtoVR is good for general coverage on HMDs and peripherals.
I certainly get the impression from the way he says it that this is something they are looking at the moment in a more advanced way and is a common conversation point in their software/hardware dev teams at the moment. VERY exciting.
I wanted to use my eyes to create 3D models via eye tracking. Looked into it for about a week before concluding it was probably impossible, or at least way less accurate than good old-fashioned hand movements.
Dunno what the Oculus guys are doing with gaze detection, but I doubt they're doing fine-grained detection such as being able to pick out a particular target with your eyes. (I would love to be wrong about this! That'd be an awesome feature. I just doubt whether it's technically possible.)
The way to convince yourself your eyeball isn't moving is to touch your actual eyeball with your fingertip -- like press lightly against the left corner side of your left eyeball with your left index finger -- and then switch your gaze back and forth between the two letters. As long as your viewing distance is correct, you won't feel any movement. (You may have to back your head away from the screen. I'm viewing from a distance of arm's length.)
On the other hand, if you look back and forth between adjacent words, then you can feel physical eye movement.
I'm assuming you've seen some peer reviewed research that fixed peoples' heads and used high resolution eye tracking to support your hypotheses, though?
I've trained myself to be able to do this with vertical lines, like window blinds.
Both are about $100 and have dev kits/SDKs, although I haven't looked closely at either.
I can't find it by googling, but a long time ago I used to read far too many Flight magazines.
One of the problems of immersive VR is that you need very high precision near the fovea ( = at the point of screen you are looking at), and you need to render very fast at the edges of vision. This means that you need to render at a very high resolution and at a very high frame rate. This is, of course, a problem.
However, while the vision at the fovea is very sharp, it is also very slow, and while the vision at the edges is very fast, it is very blurry and imprecise. With eye tracking, this is exploitable. The practice is called foveated rendering, and the idea is to only draw full precision near the position of the screen you are actually looking at, and elsewhere render at a much reduced resolution but at a higher frame rate.
In tests, this has been found to be impossible to distinguish from just drawing the full screen at full resolution and speed.
I very curious what the competition is doing. They're obviously working on competing products, but nothing has been made public.
They picked a tower defense game to demo this? Really? Who's gonna want to have full upper body motion (lean in, out, sideways, up, down) to play a tower defense game? A few people, for the novelty of it.
This type of marketing is very unfortunate. It's a technology with a lot of really cool potential and this video made it look like a gimmick.
There could also be done a lot of revolutionary new things with movies, like seeing through a character's eyes, etc (cameras mounted to the main character Google Glass style?). Even watching a normal movie on Oculus Rift is probably going to be a better experience than going to the cinema, because you could virtualize the cinema in front of you, and recreate that atmosphere.
You have to consider that from a consumer tech point of view, linking that film set to an Occulus Rift at the moment, is not a huge leap. In fact, it's so close, almost the biggest problem it faces is going to be on a creative level of re-thinking how to tell stories in a new medium. I don't think we're more than 5-10 years away.
Oculus IMAX. I like it.
With realtime rendering, however, you will get the complete, geometrically correct 3d images with head tracking. I suspect what this means is we'll start to see 3d films that are rendered in realtime. Essentially like the cutscenes we see for AAA video games, except they'd be feature length without any gameplay in between. If VR really takes off, we might even see companies like Pixar re-release their films for realtime viewing.
I would love to see a company like Pixar produce new realtime 3d films for the Rift, but it seems unlikely that would make financial sense for them. I suspect what we'll see instead is indie shorts first, followed by larger and larger budget films. The same trajectory that CG films took in the first place.
An interesting implication of this is that live footage will be basically impossible to incorporate into a true VR setting. As video resolution gets higher we may see multiple angles of scenes being recorded in ultra-high-def, and then digitally combined into a voxel scene. Probably data from something like the Kinect would have to be mixed in too, to resolve all of the voxels. That could be replayed on a Rift, but the director would have to really constrain the kind of lighting, materials, and motion for that to work well. It would be extraordinarily difficult, and I suspect you'd still have a lot of strange artifacts.
This could actually be a big shot in the arm for pure digital film production!
What would be the point of allow the user to move around (in a limited fashion anyhow) inside the movie? It doesn't improve storytelling (as games can by adding interactivity and perspective) - it strikes me as a gimmick, much like 3D films in general.
You get the whiz-bang coolness of "OMG I'm in this thing!", but ultimately it's a lot more gear than a straight-up television/movie screen for next to no gain. 3D movies had a few years of glory but is now deeply unpopular - I foresee the same for VR-movies.
* Being able to view complex choreography (martial arts, dancing, etc.) from different angles
* Conveying a sense of size and scale -- e.g. Pacific Rim, Godzilla
* Recreating some emotion or feeling imparted by the surrounding environment -- e.g. the franticness of a war zone, the claustrophobia of a submarine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0VCj7VKvFk&feature=youtu.be...
Plus, all I've heard about what Carmack has been doing is that he was working on Android stuff in the beginning.
http://www.altdevblogaday.com/2013/02/22/latency-mitigation-...
It is neat to have bigger and higher resolution screens, but I can only read the text at one point in space anyway.
Where can I buy one?
The technology does have some major disadvantages like a smaller field of view compared to Oculus, but perhaps they can fix that. After all, VR headsets like Oculus also had very small field of views before, too.
To me, having the image projected onto your retina seems like a technology that has greater potential for virtual reality, even if it starts with a slightly bigger handicap than Oculus did.
http://reviews.cnet.com/wearable-tech/avegant-glyph/4505-349...